HR Breast Cancer Survival Inferior for Black Women

“Science Daily” recently published a report that noted that Black women with hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancer have an “inferior” survival rate and are more likely to experience recurrence of the disease.

“The worse outcome was seen only in those with HR-positive, HER-2-negative breast cancer, which is the most common type of breast cancer,” Dr. Joseph A. Sparano, professor at Albert Einstein Medical College of Medicine said.

According to “Science Daily”, even when medical researchers attempted to control the factors of a “higher incidence of more advanced-stage disease, and more aggressive triple-negative disease [and] disparities in medical care,” Black patients still have a worse outcome in HR-positive cancer.

“We found that black patients exhibited similar adherence to the chemotherapy and hormonal therapy, and they didn’t do worse if they had other breast cancer subtypes. This indicates that black women with HR-positive breast cancer are more prone to have disease recurrence despite state of the art medical care,” Sparano said.